Enhancing Productivity and Innovation in ECP with a Team of Teams Approach
The core mission of ECP is to develop a capable exascale computing ecosystem that accelerates scientific discovery and supports addressing critical challenges in energy and national security. The very nature of this mission has drawn a wide range of talented and successful scientists to work together in new ways to push beyond the status-quo toward this goal. For many scientists, their past success has been achieved through efficient and agile collaboration with a small trusted team that could rapidly innovate, prototype and deliver. Thus, a key challenge for ECP is to scale this efficiency and innovation from small teams to the aggregate “team of teams” that they find themselves leading or participating in now. Essentially, it is necessary for ECP to foster a shared consciousness that is intrinsic to smaller teams, and that enables autonomous periods of heightened productivity, to now span an ecosystem of a teams of teams.
Similar challenges of scale are also on the rise in industry, business, and perhaps most profoundly our struggle against terrorism. Building on the growing literature that covers this theme, and our experiences in other DOE programs, this session will identify key challenges in scaling to a team of teams approach in the context of ECP projects, and explore strategies that our teams can use to address them. This session will be broken into two sections: roughly 30 minutes of presentations to introduce the Team of Teams concepts in the context of ECP, and roughly 60 minutes for breakout sessions that explore using this approach to enhance productivity in existing ECP projects. In particular, facilitators will lead project members through an exploration of their teams’ structure and practices, including software development methodologies, workflows, design, integrated testing, as well as face-to-face and virtual meetings. The groups will develop content for a report out highlighting aspects of their current team of teams management that are working well, along with insights and approaches that they are excited about trying to implement when they return. Participants will take away lessons learned from the national security sector and industry that they can immediately put to use in their own ECP projects and programs.
Breakout Links
We have setup a couple of Google Docs for the breakout session:
Vocabulary (review/add/update terms from the books)
Group Discussion (add your groups thoughts/achievements/comments/questions).
Resources